1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to printing methods and printing apparatuses.
2. Description of the Related Art
Printers with built-in scanners (referred to as scanner/printer/copier, or SPC, multifunction apparatuses below) are becoming popular in homes nowadays. An SPC multifunction apparatus includes a scanner section for generating image data by scanning an original on an original bed in one direction and reading the image thereof, a memory such as an SDRAM for temporarily storing the above-mentioned image data, and a printer section for printing a print image on paper according to the image data read out from a memory area of the memory. The reading operations with the scanner section and the printing operations with the printer section are performed in parallel to shorten the time for copying. That is, by successively repeating, for the entire area of the original, the concurrent processing of reading a portion of the image of the above-mentioned original and writing and storing the image data into the memory area while concurrently performing printing on the paper according to the above-mentioned image data read out from the above-mentioned memory area, copy processing in a short amount of time is achieved.
However, since the memory size, which is the storage capacity of the above-mentioned memory, is limited, overwriting of image data onto a portion of the memory area in which image data that has already been read out for printing used to exist is permitted when free space runs out during the foregoing copying process. This overwriting may occur particularly in cases where the image data size becomes large, such as when performing high-quality color copying. It is needless to say that only a portion of the image data corresponding to the print image subjected to copying remains in the memory when the copying is complete for the first sheet. Therefore, a re-reading operation needs to be performed with the scanner section every time a copy is to be made, even when making a number of copies of the same original on the original bed. The process of making a number of copies in the above-mentioned SPC multifunction apparatus is set in accordance with the above-mentioned case; that is, it is set so that the re-reading operation is performed every time a copy is to be made, without exception.
However, there are cases in which the whole image data corresponding to the above-mentioned print image can fit into the above-mentioned memory area. For example, there is a high possibility that the whole image data corresponding to the above-mentioned print image can be stored, in terms of size, into the memory area for low-quality monochrome copying since the image data size is small. Further, since low-quality monochrome copying is used comparatively frequently, the time for copying could be shortened and the usability of such copying process would be excellent if it were possible to omit the re-reading operation when making a number of copies at least for monochrome copying.